


No Tall Flower to Meet You

by thedisgruntledone



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Post-Season/Series 01, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-06 14:56:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18390686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedisgruntledone/pseuds/thedisgruntledone
Summary: Will would have said that the worst thing that could have happened to him already had. But that was before he started coughing up flowers.





	No Tall Flower to Meet You

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place after season 1 but references some season 2 plot points.

Something is wrong with him. He feels ill, shivery. It's hard to breathe and there's a tickle in the back of his throat. He doesn't want to cough, though - what if he brings up more slugs? He can't bear the thought of it happening again. The idea of having more of those _things_ inside of him makes him want to throw up. 

So he ignores it. Clears his throat gently when the tickle worsens, and Mike looks up with a rueful smile. "I know I talk about her too much. Sorry." 

Will shakes his head, afraid to open his mouth lest the coughing start. He can't let Mike see, not when he's the only one who doesn't treat him like he's broken. 

Mike shakes his head back at him. "No? No what? No I don't talk about her too much?" he laughs. "Liar. I know I do." 

The laugh makes everything worse; Will's chest tightens like it always does when Mike's face lights up like that, and that makes the need to cough almost impossible to resist. But he can't let Mike think that he's bothering him (even if it does; knowing Mike has fallen for someone else _hurts_ , even if he's always known that it could never, would never be him), so he does resist; pushes the cough down and forces the words out. "It doesn't bother me. It's fine." 

But that is all he can handle. He has to cough; it feels like there’s something climbing up his throat and he's going to choke if he can't let it out, and he barely manages to eek out a "bathroom" before he's racing for the door, slamming it behind him and coughing, coughing, coughing. He closes his eyes and ignores the fists pounding on the door, Mike’s voice yelling his name, high and panicked. 

Finally he heaves, and the thing in his throat is dislodged. He closes his eyes even tighter for a moment, afraid of what he'll find when he opens them, but he knows he has no choice. He looks down. 

His mouth drops open. The floor is covered in bright yellow petals. Will has no idea what to make of them. 

The bathroom doorknob jiggles then pops open. Nancy is kneeling there, bobby pin in hand, Mike standing behind her looking scared out of his mind. Then his eyes fall on the floor and the fear is replaced by utter confusion. "Where did those come from?" he asks, and Will can only shake his head. 

“Don’t know,” he says in a croaky voice, and coughs again, cupping his hand over his mouth. Something falls into his hand, and when he pulls it back there are two bright yellow petals resting in his palm. He holds it out so Mike can see. “I think – I think they came from me.” 

Nancy drives him home. Mike comes along. They sit in the back together and don’t talk, because Will’s throat hurts and Mike is too freaked out. He keeps looking at Will with huge eyes, and Will wishes he wouldn’t. He’s not supposed to look at him like that, like he’s going to break. He’s the only one who doesn’t, and if he starts to Will knows it’ll be unbearable. 

He stares at his own feet and bites his lip. Hates everything and everyone and wishes that he could just be normal. Bad enough that he has to go to Hawkins lab once a week already; he just knows that this is going to mean an extra trip. It’s going to mean more worried looks from his mom when she thinks he isn’t looking, more Jonathan pretending that he wants to spend all of his free time with him instead of doing something fun. More of his friends being awkward. 

He hates the way his mom looks when she sees the Wheeler’s station wagon pull into the driveway. She comes out quickly, not quite running, and he wants to tell her that he’s fine, it’s okay, but instead his chest tightens and he starts to cough again. 

Nothing comes up, and Nancy handles most of the explanation. Will is grateful for it; his throat is killing him. He wants water. He ignores the rest of them and goes inside. 

His mom comes in a few minutes later. She gives him a smile that trembles at the edges. “I’ll call Dr. Owens,” she tells him. “It’s going to be okay.” He watches her hands shake as she picks up the phone and wonders. 

~****~ 

They do their tests.  

Will shivers in a flimsy hospital gown as they take his blood pressure, x-ray his chest, and make him cough over and over. That's the part he hates the most. It hurts to cough, even though it doesn't always bring up the petals. It feels like there’s something inside his chest, squeezing his lungs and making it impossible to breathe.  

After, he sits on a chair just outside Dr. Owens's office, still shivering, listening to them talk through the door. His mom left it cracked just a bit, and Will loves her for that even if it was an accident. He needs to know.  

"First, this isn't new or incurable." 

Joyce lets out a relieved exhalation, and Will feels his own shoulders droop with the weight of his relief.  

"Has Will had all of his vaccinations?" 

"What?" Joyce asks, sounding confused. "Of course he has; it's a requirement for school. Can you stop asking stupid questions and just tell me, already? What's going on with my son?" Will can hear her rummaging in her purse for a moment, then the sound of a lighter and her inhaling. He winces, waiting for Dr. Owens to tell her to put it out.  

He doesn't, though. Maybe he sees that Joyce is smoking to distract herself from her renewed anxiety. Will kind of wishes that he smoked so he could do the same.  

"Have you ever heard of Hanahaki Disease?" 

Will hasn't, but the grave way that Dr. Owens is speaking scares him. He's surprised when his mom starts to laugh.  

"You can't be serious. Love sickness?  _Will_? Assuming that's even possible, who would he-" 

His mom cuts off and Will winces again. She's smart, his mom, and she  _knows_  him. He can practically see her going back over things in her mind and coming to the right conclusion. Who else could Will have developed unrequited feelings for but Mike Wheeler? 

Not just unrequited feelings, though, is it? It's love. He is love sick. Dimly, he hears the conversation in the office start back up again, but he can no longer pay attention. He doubles over, his head on his knees, and tries to breathe through the sudden panic as everything seems to hit him at once. This isn't just some silly little crush that is going to go away. He's  _in love_  with Mike. Mike, who will never look at him that way. In love, so in love that he's sick with it, coughing up petals, suffocating on them, and oh, God, what does that mean? Is there any way to cure it or will he keep coughing up petals forever? And what if that isn't the worst of it? Can people die of this thing, coughing and coughing until they choke? Until they're so full of flowers that they can't find a way to breathe around them? Will  _he_  die? 

He starts to cough; can't help it. He coughs and he coughs and petals spill from his lips, creating bright yellow puddles at his feet. The door flies open and his mom is there, Dr. Owens trailing after her. Her hand is on his back and she's talking to him, telling him over and over that it'll be okay, baby, you'll be fine, breathe with me, now…he closes his eyes and waits for it to be over. 

Mike is already at the house when they get back. His face is small and pinched; worried in a way that Will hasn't seen in a while. He hates it. He hates that he's the reason Mike looks like that again, hates that he's causing even more trouble for the people who care about him. All of this was supposed to be done with.

"So what is it?" he asks as soon as he opens his car door. No small talk, no stepping around what he wants to know. Will has always liked that about him, but now he resents it, just a bit. 

Joyce looks over at him, but Will doesn't meet her eyes. The ride home had been silent; Will could see the questions all over Joyce's face, but she hadn't asked, and he hadn't been able to either. Hadn't been able to make himself find out if she hates him now. If she agrees with all the horrible things that his dad used to say. 

"He's going to be fine," she says finally, her voice quiet. "The doctors know how to take care of it. It's nothing to do with that place." 

Will does look at her then. She is looking back at him, her gaze fierce but not angry, and he realizes that it doesn't matter. She's probably always suspected, if not outright known, and it hasn't changed her opinion of him one bit. The only fear in her face is fear _for_ him, not _of_. Never of. He sends her a tentative smile, and she returns it with a watery one of her own. They haven't discussed the options that Dr. Owens laid out for him, but now he knows that when they do, she will listen to him and what he wants, just like she's always done and always will. 

"I love you, mom," he says, not caring that Mike is right there and that thirteen year old boys don't say that kind of stuff to their moms in front of their friends. Mike won't care anyway, and he _does_ love her. She's the best mom in the world. 

Joyce blinks, startled, but then a smile spreads over her face, and it wipes out the tired lines around her eyes and mouth. "I love you, too, kiddo. Always." 

Will smiles back. It's going to be okay. They will see to it. 

~****~

Will has to admit that he’s impressed that Mike manages to hang on to his questions until they get to his room. With the way he’d burst out earlier, he’d kind of thought that he wouldn’t be able to help himself, but Mike holds his tongue until Will’s door has shut behind them.

“So you want to tell me what’s going on, or are you going to blow me off again?”

Will fidgets, looking down. “I haven’t been blowing you off. I –“

“Mr. Clarke says that it sounds like Hanahaki Disease.”

Will’s head snaps up. “You talked to Mr. Clarke about it?”

“I didn’t say it was _you_ ,” Mike says quickly. “He assumed I’d read it somewhere. I swear; he has no idea. No one does, except Nancy.” He gives Will a faintly reproachful look. “Do you think I’d tell anyone?”

“No,” Will admits. “I don’t.”

Now Mike is the one who looks away. Biting at his lips, he says in a soft, almost tentative voice. “Mr. Clarke said that it has to do with love.”

“Yeah,” Will says. He feels weirdly calm about this conversation. There’s no way that they’re getting out of it without Mike finding out the truth, but that might just be a good thing. No matter how Mike reacts to it, he’s not going to fall back in love with Will, and having him know and say that might just be the push that Will needs to get rid of this thing. “Dr. Owens said that it used to be really bad, back before they made a vaccination.” What Dr. Owens had actually said was that the disease didn’t differentiate between infatuation and real love. So people were getting sick all over the place, coughing up petals by the dozens, kids and adults alike. Most of the time, Dr. Owens had assured him, it was a simple crush and wouldn’t progress past the second stage of sickness – the petal vomiting. Uncomfortable and embarrassing, yes, but not life threatening. But sometimes the feelings only grew deeper, and that was when things got dangerous. The infected person would start coughing up whole flowers, and would find it harder and harder to breathe as more grew in the lungs. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The final stage was suffocation as the vines of the flowers, with nowhere to go, strangled the lungs and reached up through the throat. It was the horribleness of those deaths, however rare, that pushed doctors into finding a way to stop it. But Will doesn’t want to tell mike all that. He looks worried enough. 

“He said people died,” Mike says, and Will sighs.

“Yeah, some did. But most only coughed up petals, like me. Most people weren’t really in love, so nothing too bad happened.” He shrugs. “It’s scary, and weird, but I don’t think I’m gonna die. I’m too young for real love,” he says with a smile.

Mike doesn’t smile back. “It’s just petals, right? Not…the other stuff? Flowers, and thorns, and –“

“Mr. Clarke told you all that?” Will asks, and Mike flushes, looking down at his sneakers.

“No, he just gave me the name, really, and that thing about love. I looked the rest up in the library.” he shrugs, flushing harder, looking extremely embarrassed. It looks good on him, Will thinks, and his chest tightens and his throat starts to tickle with the hint of a cough. Will swallows hard. No. No, he can’t cough now. He has to get through this first. He looks away from Mike just as he looks up. “Don’t laugh,” he says, but he doesn’t sound mad, and Will realizes that he’s smiling. Hell. He clears it off his face and looks back up.

“I’m not laughing; I think you’re a great friend,” he says, and he means it. Means it so much that it seems to burn in his chest, different from the petals. This is a good kind of hurt, the kind of hurt that makes him want to cry and laugh at the same time. It’s the kind of hurt he feels when he thinks about how much his mom loves him.

“Yeah?” a half smile curls Mike’s mouth, and the tightening in his chest gets worse, but Will doesn’t look away.

“Yeah. The best.”

Will walks Mike out, waves at him every time he looks back (he looks back a _lot_ , Will notices. Like Will's going to disappear in a shower of petals if he doesn’t), and then makes sure to give his mom (watching anxiously from the living room while trying to pretend she isn’t) a smile before he heads around back, to Castle Byers. He can feel the flowers rising in his throat but he forces them down, swallows hard and holds his breath so that he doesn’t cough. He knows that his mom will come for him, that she will see, but he thinks that he’ll have just a bit of time to himself. Just enough to get this over with.

He’s coughing as soon as he gets inside, falling to his knees, his body shaking with the force of the coughs coming out of his mouth. But the petals don’t fall. Instead they back up in his throat, choking him. He gags, and then gags again. He can feel the blood rushing to his head as he struggles to breathe; he tries not to panic but he can feel it rising in his chest. Just when he thinks that he’s actually going to choke to death on petals, his body gives a giant heave and something large and yellow comes flying out of his mouth.

He starts taking in great whoops of air, throat burning, tears leaking helplessly from his eyes. He wipes at them with hands that shake, and looks at the ground, and at the large sunflower laying just in front of his feet.

(“So who is it?” Mike had asked as he was putting on his coat, and Will froze. He’d been so sure that Mike _knew_ , that it had to be written all over him all the time, his stupid crush, but Mike met his eyes with open curiosity. He really didn’t know, hadn’t figured it out, and Will opened his mouth to tell him, to put an end to this once and for all…and then closed it. He couldn’t. It was one thing to admit the truth if Mike knew, and quite another to tell him. In the end he never answered)

Will bends down and picks the flower up from the ground. He expects it to be heavy, and is surprised when it isn’t. Is surprised, too, by how pretty it is, the yellow petals darkening to gold.

The back door bangs shut, and Will jumps. He shoots a short, panicked look over his shoulder and then, in a split second decision that he doesn’t really understand, he begins ripping the petals off of the flower, tossing them to the floor. He shoves the rest into his pocket just as his mom asks if she has permission to enter.

“Yeah,” he says, and winces at how scratchy his voice sounds.

His mom takes in the flowers around him with a small frown. She touches his face. “That was a bad one, wasn’t it? You’re all red. I could hear you coughing from the house. And you sound awful.”

He nods. He still feels shaky and like he wants to gulp at the air, but he forces himself to act as natural as possible. He knows it’s time for The Talk. The one where they make the decision on what to do, how to handle this thing.

(“You have two options,” Dr. Owens had told them in his office, gently enough. He’d tried to meet Will’s gaze but Will had kept his focus on his shoes, so the doctor was forced to talk to the top of his head. “In most cases, especially in someone as young as yourself, the symptoms would stop on their own. You’ve only expelled petals thus far?”

Will nodded, still not looking up.

“Good, good. There is every chance that that is as far as it will go. Once the infatuation has passed, the disease will go away on its own, and we can see about vaccinating you against it. The second option is the return of feeling. In that case, as in the other, the symptoms will decrease and eventually go away altogether.

“The thing about this disease is that there is no time limit on when the symptoms occur,” he went on. “A patient can remain in the any of the first three stages for weeks, months, and on some occasions (rare, but documented) even years. Then there were those who cycled through them in a matter of days. The one thing that was true every time, however, was that the fourth stage resulted in death. Once a patient hit that point, it was all over.

 “That is why the third and final option must be taken if you reach the third stage. Should that happen, we will surgically remove the flowers from your lungs. However, I would not recommend doing so unless that stage is reached.”

“Wait,” Joyce said. “Why leave it so late? Will’s only in stage two and sometimes he coughs so much that he can’t breathe. Is it because it’s so invasive?”)

They move things into the house, to the kitchen table where most of the serious discussions seem to take place. This is where they’ve discussed report cards and chores. This is the place where Joyce sat them down and told them that their father wasn’t coming home. It’s also the place where Will tried (and failed) to tell his family about the Upside Down. About how scared he’d been, how he’d tried to run and been unable. About how there were things that crawled there. Things that bit. He supposes it’s fitting that they’re having this discussion here, too. Will clenches his fists under the table and clenches his jaw against sudden, surprising anger. _Isn’t it enough that it took me in the first place?_ He thinks, feeling sullen and resentful. _Does it have to keep hurting me? Have to_ keep _taking?_

Joyce clears her throat. “Surgery is off the table, right?” she asks. “No full flowers?” She goes on before Will can answer, secure in her belief that this is a simple crush. “So I guess we wait it out.” She lights a cigarette and inhales. The hand holding the cigarette is trembling, and he reaches out to grab the other one.

“I need the surgery,” is what he _should_ say. He knows he should. This isn’t worth the final stage; it isn’t worth hurting his mom and Jonathan and everyone else who cares about him just to keep this feeling that brings him a lot of pain and very little joy. Full flowers mean _love_ , real _love_ , and that makes the fourth stage more likely than ever. More likely than it going away like everyone believes will happen.

“It’ll be fine,” is what he says instead. He thinks that he should be upset, or scared, or confused. _Something._ Instead he feels calm. He understands that on some level, he’s been planning this since he saw the large flower lying at his feet; why else would he have pulled off the petals and hidden the rest where his mom wouldn’t see? “It’ll go away, you’ll see.”

Joyce gives him a small smile and squeezes his hand. “Did you tell him?”

Will feels his face heat and shakes his head. “Chickened out,” he says, “but it’ll probably wear off on its own, anyway. Like Dr. Owens said.” _Liar, liar, pants on fire_ a merry voice sings in his head, but Will ignores it. “It wouldn’t be fair, anyway. It’s not his fault I’m a freak.”

“Hey, no. No, I will not have that.” Joyce puts her cigarette in the ashtray next to her and cups his chin, forcing him to meet her eyes. Her hand smells faintly of the cigarette that she was holding; he wrinkles his nose slightly. “You are _not_ a freak. You are a wonderful, talented, amazing kid, and I will not hear that crap out of your mouth again. Who you like, who you _love_ , doesn’t change any of that, even if it is different. Do you understand me?” She holds his face until he agrees, and then lets him go to pull him into a hug instead.

He feels the tears coming, but grimly fights them back. He doesn’t have a right to cry about this. What he’s doing is awful, and selfish, and if his mom knew she’d have him scheduled for a surgery today. He hugs her back hard, and tells himself that he still has time. He can change his mind, of course he can. Probably will. Sure.

(“It _is_ invasive, and that’s part of it,” Dr. Owens answered. Will could still feel his eyes on him, boring through his head, even as he answered Joyce’s question. “But another reason that we don’t like to perform it for stage one or two patients is that while it removes the disease, it renders the patient immune by also rendering them incapable of romantic love.”

Joyce laughed. “Oh, come on. You can’t remove a _feeling_. That’s not possible.”

“It shouldn’t be possible to grow flowers in one’s lungs, and yet here we are.”

That had stopped the laughter. “Shit,” she’d said, and lit another cigarette. Once again Dr. Owens didn’t say anything. Will finally looked up to find his gaze trained on his face. “I know this is pretty terrifying, but it’s not life threatening. And it’s very unlikely to be. However, if you even think that you might be progressing to stage three, you’ll let your mom know, won’t you?”

“Yes”).

~****~

He half-expects things to move quickly after that, but they don’t. Life goes on as it always does; Will goes to school and comes home, does his homework and plays at the arcade or in Mike’s basement on the weekends. Dustin and Lucas don’t know what’s going on – Will told Mike that he doesn’t want them babying him and Mike had sworn to keep his mouth shut – and weirdly enough the coughing seems to slow down as the disease progresses. Will walks around with his chest feeling heavy and a constant tickle at the back of his throat, but he’s gotten good at ignoring both of those things. He’s gotten good at lying too – even Mike thinks that he’s getting better, and he watches Will like a hawk. 

The hardest times are with Mike. Often the two of them are by themselves because Jonathan or his mom is picking him up after work and they aren’t always off when they think they will be, and Will gets a lot of practice at swallowing carefully around the flowers climbing up his throat, or coughing lightly enough to clear it but not enough for Mike to see that he isn’t getting better. When he can’t do that, he excuses himself to the bathroom so that he can hide most of the evidence.

In hindsight, it’s no surprise that he’s at Mike’s when everything goes to shit. They are in the basement reading comics. Will is staying the over; Joyce has a late shift at work and so does Jonathan, and no one wants to leave him alone at night anymore. There’s a squawk from Mike’s fort, and then a burst of static, and Will jumps. Mike jumps too, but he’s aiming for the fort, a giant, hopeful smile on his face. He unearths his walkie from the nest of blankets. “El?” he asks. “El, is that you?”

More static, then Dustin’s voice, tinny. “Did I leave my backpack over there? I can’t find it, over.”

Mike’s face falls. “No, your stupid backback’s not here,” he barks back, and then turns the walkie off and tosses it aside, scowling.

“Mike?”

He shakes his head. “I knew it wasn’t her. I did. But I can’t stop checking. It might be. That’s how she found you, right? So she could find me too. If she wanted.” He draws his knees up and hugs them. “Sometimes, I feel like she’s calling me, but then when I look around she’s never there,” he says. “Crazy, right?”

Will shakes his head. He can’t talk; his chest is tight, so tight, he has to cough but he can’t even breathe. It’s easy to forget, sometimes, how much Mike likes El. It’s not something he brings up a lot, so it’s easy, but remembering it hurts a little worse every time. And then he feels stupid and small and selfish, because he _knows_ how Mike feels, and he wants to be a good friend and listen, but he can’t.

“Be right back,” he says, and that gets him started. He’s coughing well before he gets into the bathroom, petals coming out of his mouth and falling on the floor, and he barely has time to get the door shut before he’s falling to his knees and hacking, practically choking. He coughs out a few flowers and then something gets stuck. He can’t breathe; can’t breathe. He gags, then sticks his hand in his mouth, his fingers brushing more petals. He gets a grip on the flower and tugs, eyes wide and panicked, then gags again as something rubs against the back of his throat. It comes out, though, and he stares at the flower in his hand, and the thick stem protruding from it. _Oh my God,_ he thinks, but the words echo in his ears and he realizes too late that he forgot to lock the bathroom door.

When he looks up, Mike is staring at the flower in Will’s hand, his eyes wide and face so pale that each freckle (he hates them, thinks that they make him look like a kid, but Will has always liked them) on his face stands out in stark relief. He looks like he’s about to fall over. Will reaches out, but he backs away, so fast he nearly trips over his own feet.

“You. You. You _liar_ ,” he says, voice shaking. “You said you were better. That isn’t better. This is the complete _opposite_ of better.”

“Mike-“

“I don’t get it. Why would you tell us you were better if you weren’t? Why would you lie?” Mike shakes his head. “This is stage _three_ , Will. This is _serious_.”

“I know,” Will says, wincing at the burn in his throat.

It only seems to make Mike angry. “Then why?” he shouts. “Why haven’t you said anything?”

Will sits back. “Do you know what happens if they remove it?” he asks. It hurts to talk, but he has to get this out. Has to explain, if he can. Thinks that Mike might be the only one who understands.

“Yeah, so what?” he answers, shrugging his shoulders. Will stares at him and he flushes, but doesn’t back down. “Beats being dead,” he insists, mouth twisting.

“So if it were you, you’d give up El?”

Mike’s mouth opens, closes. Opens again. “That’s different. El likes me back.” Oh, and that hurts. Will’s breathing gets heavy and he feels flowers rising in his throat. Mike, oblivious as always, keeps going. “And if she didn’t, then yeah, I’d do it. Get rid of it.”

“But then you’d never feel it again,” Will says. The words are slow and hard to say - he’s speaking around the urge to cough – but he forces them out, one by one. “Never get another crush, or fall in love. And you’d remember how it felt, and you’d miss it, even if it hurt. Even i-i-i –“ but it’s too much. Between the way that Mike is looking at him and what he’s said and the knowledge that this love that is killing him is never going to be returned, Will can’t hold it back any more and he’s coughing, falling forward again. He barely hears Mike’s panicked shouting, barely feels the hands he puts on his shoulders. This is a bad one; feels like it’s _pulling_ deep inside, and when it’s finally over there are half a dozen new sunflowers on the ground. Two of them have stems. All of them are flecked with blood.

Will lists weakly to the side, into Mike. He doesn’t mean to, but he can’t help it. Mike’s there, kneeling next to him (and when did _that_ happen? Will doesn’t know), and Will’s so tired…he closes his eyes.

“Will, hey, no. Don’t do that. Will.” Mike shakes him lightly, but Will can only give him a sleepy murmur in response. His throat burns, and the idea of opening his eyes and explaining to Mike that he’s going to take a nap makes it throb. Mike’ll figure it out. He settles against him more firmly. Mike’s arms are tight around him and it feels good. Comfortable. Safe.

“Open your eyes,” Mike says, and he sounds scared. Will doesn’t want to open his eyes, but he doesn’t like Mike to sound like that, either, so he forces them open even though it feels like there are weights attached to his eyelids. Mike _looks_ scared, too, and he’s crying.

Will swallows, wincing against the pain. Swallows again, then says, in a whisper that feels like broken glass, “s’okay.”

“It’s not okay. It’s awful.” Large tears are rolling down Mike’s cheeks and dripping off of his chin, but he doesn’t try to wipe them away, probably because he’s supporting Will. So Will does it for him. Lifts his arm with effort and makes a few clumsy swipes at Mike’s face, but the tears keep coming, and Will’s hand falls back down. “You’re so stupid,” Mike says. “You should’ve just done it, should’ve just gotten the surgery. No one is worth this, especially not some dumbo who doesn’t see how awesome you are.”

Will smiles. “You’re not a dumbo,” he says, the words slurred. He loses the battle with the weights on his eyelids just as Mike’s expression begins to change from confusion to horror. He passes out.

The next thing that he is aware of is a slow, steady beeping. His chest feels tight, as it always does now, and he feels a prickly, too aware sensation on one of his arms. He tries to open his eyes, but they’re not quite ready. Someone is holding his hand, and someone is speaking.

“-down.”

“I will not calm down!” Joyce yells, and Will knows that it was her first shout that woke him up. “You’re telling me that there’s nothing you can do for my son; that all we can do is watch him die, and you want me to _calm down_?”

“It’s progressed too far. If he’d said something when the symptoms first started-“

“Yeah, well, that doesn’t help us now, does it?” The hand holding his squeezes painfully, and Will makes a soft noise, trying to pull it away. “Baby?” his mom asks, and he opens his eyes to her frantic face. “Oh, thank God. You’re awake.” She looks haggard, the lines around her mouth and eyes deep with stress and pain, and Will feels tears prick his eyes. He opens his mouth to apologize, but nothing comes out except a dry croak.

“Don’t try to speak,” Dr. Owens says, and Will tears his eyes from his mom’s to look at him. He looks older, too, sad, and Will wonders if that’s also his fault. Just beyond Dr. Owens is Jonathan, looking pale and tired, dark shadows under his eyes. Will turns his gaze back to Dr. Owens. It’s easier. “Your throat is pretty raw. Try to drink a bit, first.” He gives Joyce a nod, and she turns away for a moment, and when she comes back she’s holding a cup towards him. There is a straw sticking out of it. It’s water, cool but not cold, and he drinks the entire cup and then another before he leans back, eyes once again trained on Dr. Owens.

“Do you know why you’re here?” he asks, and Will nods. “Good. Do-“

“Why _are_ we here, Will?” his mom asks, voice thick with tears. “Why would you do something like this?”

“I don-“

“I swear, if you say you don’t know…” Will looks at her. She’s angry, but it’s a helpless sort of anger. There’s nothing she can do. Nothing _anyone_ can do. Will screwed up, and now he knows it with the bright clarity of hindsight. At the time, he hadn’t wanted to live without feeling this way again, even if it hurt. It had seemed worth it. He still thinks that it is, mostly. Sure, it hurts, hurts so terribly sometimes - when Mike talks about El and his eyes go all soft and mushy looking, or when he told Will that he tries to get ahold of her every night, without fail – but there’s also sweetness, and happiness. He still doesn’t want to give that up – but he knows that he would, now. Because even though he’d thought he understood what he was doing, he hadn’t, not really. Now he can, and he wishes with all his heart that he could take it back. Do the right thing. Keep his mom from looking like that.

Dr. Owens clears his throat lightly, reminding them that he’s there. Joyce clenches her jaw tight and turns her head, taking a deep breath. Will fixes his eyes on Dr. Owens so that he won’t start crying, but he can feel them building up anyway.

“How are you feeling, Will?” he asks.

“I-my chest hurts,” he says. His voice is hoarse and it hurts to talk. “And my throat.”

“All right. We’re going to try to make you as comfortable as we can.” He hesitates, glancing at Joyce, who is still turned away. “I’m afraid that’s all we can do at this stage.”

Joyce waits until he’s gone to speak. She still isn’t looking at him, but Will can tell that she’s crying. It makes his chest hurt, worse than the flowers.

“Why, Will? Why would you do this?”

He isn’t sure what to say. All of his reasons seem so stupid in the face of his mom’s pain. “I’m sorry,” he says, his own tears starting to fall. “Please don’t hate me.” He sounds like he’s five, he knows, but he can’t help it. He’s made his mom cry again, broken her heart again, and this time it was all his fault. If she does hate him it’ll be his own fault.

Joyce turns back to him, wiping at her eyes. She reaches for his hand, gripping it tightly. “I don’t hate you. I could never hate you. You hear me?” She shakes her head. “I just – baby, I know it wasn’t fair. I know that that place just keeps taking and taking from you. But this isn’t worth your life.”

Will doesn’t say anything. There’s nothing he can say.

She leaves soon after, promising to return with his drawing stuff. He knows that she’s leaving so that she can cry more where he can’t see, and he can’t help the way he clings to her hand. He wants to do something to comfort her even though he knows he can’t.

~****~

Mike doesn’t speak at first. Just fidgets, looking at the walls, the floor. Anywhere but at Will. For his part, Will watches him and waits. He knows what’s coming – has always known, in the back of his mind, what would happen if Mike ever realized how he felt – but it doesn’t matter so much anymore. He thinks that what he should have done is tell Mike at the beginning, when he’d asked. Then maybe he’d have let Will down as gently as he’s going to try to do now, and maybe he would have gotten better on his own. The way he was supposed to. Will thinks that it was the hope that he really couldn’t let go of. And now he has to let go of everything. So stupid.

Even more stupid, he still really likes looking at Mike’s face. He’s no longer hopeful about much – the knowledge of how badly he’s wrecked everything sits in his chest, heavier than the flowers choking his lungs – but he still adores Mike Wheeler with all of his stupid, pathetic self.

Will sighs, and Mike’s gaze flies towards him. “It’s me,” he blurts, “I’m the reason you’re-“

“It’s not your fault,” Will says. There’s a tickle at the back of his throat, but that never really goes away anymore. He ignores it. “You couldn’t have done anything.”

“I could have told you not to bother,” Mike says harshly, and Will winces. He’d expected Mike to be gentle because Mike is _always_ gentle with him. He hadn’t expected him to be angry, but he guesses that he should have. Everyone else is angry with him. _Jonathan isn’t_ , he thinks, but that’s different. Jonathan gets it, would probably have done the same in his place; just pined quietly for Nancy Wheeler until it destroyed him. _Wheelers and Byerses, oh me oh my_ he thinks with sudden amusement.

 (“You gonna yell at me, too?” he’d asked when his mom had finally stalked out of the room. He’s never been sullen, but dying apparently brought that out in him. Dying, or dealing with what his death was doing to everyone who loved him. And he still wasn’t sorry that he’d done it. Not really.

“Nah. I figure you’re getting enough of that from mom.” Jonathan sat down in the chair that Joyce had never bothered to use, and grabbed Will’s hand, giving it a squeeze. “I wish you’d said something, but I get it.”

“Really?”

He shrugged. “It’s different on this side of it, but I think so. If you gave it up, you’d never know what it felt like to have those feelings returned. I don’t like it, but I get why you did it this way.”)

“I could have told you I like El. That you were being stupid, and that you should do us both a favor and stop.” There are two patches of red high on Mike’s cheeks, but other than that his face is chalky pale. He glares at Will and clenches his fists. Each word is a bullet aimed right at Will’s tired heart.  “I could have told you that you were wasting your time.”

“You think I didn’t know that?” Will asks. He’s so tired. Tired of fighting with his mom and trying to explain to Jonathan and especially tired of keeping himself from thinking about stupid Mike Wheeler because thinking about him makes it worse, and he’s trying not to make things any worse than he has. He gets that he’s gone this to himself, gets that he’s put his favorite people through hell, but he’s not going to lie here and let Mike rip him apart into the bargain. He doesn’t have that right. “Maybe that’s why I didn’t say anything to you, you think? Because I didn’t want this to happen!”

 “Yeah, you’d rather just die,” Mike yells back, advancing towards the bed with rapid steps. Will leans back, but there’s nowhere to go. He’s trapped. Mike looms over Will and reaches out like he wants to shake him, but then the door flies open and his mom bursts in, followed closely by Jonathan, and she pulls Mike away from him, pushing him into Jonathan, who closes his arms around him just in time. Mike lunges towards Will, looking crazed, and yells. “You’re dying for nothing! I hate you! I-“ and then both he and Jonathan are out the door. Will can hear muffled yells and then a thump and crash, followed by silence.

Joyce bites her lip and looks at Will, brow furrowed. “I’m sure he didn’t mean that,” she starts, but Will shakes his head.

“He meant it.” It hurts about as bad as Will thought. He feels sick to his stomach. In all their years of friendship he and Mike have never fought like that. They’ve gotten into fights, sure, but they hardly ever yell, and Mike has _never_ told Will he hates him. His eyes well up and he turns his face away. His mom grasps his hand and he lets her, but doesn’t do anything else to accept the comfort she’s trying to give. He deserves this, deserves it for so many things, mostly for being so _wrong._ So wrong that he’s in love with a boy instead of some pretty girl. But he can’t help it. He’s never going to fall in love with some pretty girl.

Will closes his eyes and pretends to sleep. He’s pretty sure that his mom is aware he’s faking – he’s still crying, for one, so it can hardly be the most convincing act in the world – but she lets him pretend, and by the time Jonathan comes back in he actually has fallen asleep.

He dreams of flowers.

~****~

Jonathan is the first to say something. Dustin and Lucas have come by, and Will is helping Dustin tease Lucas about Max, who is apparently even cooler than they all thought at the beginning of the year and who Lucas has a raving crush on

(Dustin liked her too, he’d told Will when Lucas went to the bathroom, but he was stepping back for the good of the party. Max liked Lucas better anyway, and Steve Harrington had told him it was classier to back off than fight – not that Dustin would have let it get to that anyway.

“Steve Harrington?” Will asked, incredulous. “Since when are you getting advice from _Steve Harrington_?”

Dustin had flushed and mumbled something about hair. Or maybe something about a chair. Will couldn’t really catch it, but he let it go. Still, _weird_ )

Will looks up in the middle of this to see Jonathan frowning at him. _What?_ he mouths, and Jonathan shakes his head. But later, after the other two have left, he asks, “When’s the last time you coughed?”

He thinks back. “This morning,” he says, surprised.

Jonathan smiles. “That’s good, right? How are you feeling?”

“Same as always,” he says, and it’s true. His chest still feels tight and painful, and like he could start coughing at any moment, but - he tries to stop the thought from forming, but he’s too slow – he _hasn’t_ coughed. And he should have, really, during his friends’ visit. He doesn’t like to think of Mike anymore, the pain of unrequited love mixing with a horrible, burning humiliation that he can’t help but recoil from, but today he couldn’t help it. He was there in the way that Lucas and Dustin were so careful not to mention him, in his very absence, almost like a silent, angry ghost in the corner, watching the others laugh and hating Will. He should have coughed, but he hadn’t.

He and Jonathan look at each other, and he sees the same tentative excitement that he’s feeling in his brother’s eyes. “Don’t tell mom,” they say at the same time, and grin.

But it turns out that while Jonathan was the first to mention it, he wasn’t the first to notice. They’ve all gotten so used to people moving in and out of Will’s room that they’ve almost stopped seeing them, and they’ve all forgotten that he’s being closely monitored. They remember, though, when Dr. Owens starts his tests. His tests, and his questions.

(“How are you feeling, Will?” he’d asked, and Will had shrugged. This was the question of every morning, and the answer never really changed. Except lately something had, but Will was still afraid to think too hard about it, as if doing so would change things, maybe make the disease remember that it was killing him.

“Same? No change at all?” he prodded, and something in his voice had gotten Will’s attention. Joyce’s, too; she’d been rummaging in her purse for something, but she stopped and raised her head, her eyes narrowed on the doctor.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I’d like to run some more tests on Will,” Dr. Owens said, his eyes never moving from Will’s. “Before I say anything definite I would like to know what we’re dealing with.”)

They wait for him to return after the new round of tests, all of them nearly vibrating out of their skin with nervous energy. Joyce is jittery; she wants a cigarette but cannot smoke in here. Will reaches for one of her hands, and he sees Jonathan do the same on her other side. 

“How long have you been feeling better?”

“Not long,” Will says. “We just didn’t want to get your hopes up if we were wrong.”

“We?” She looks at Jonathan, then shakes her head. “Of course you know. Okay. Fine. So what about Mike?”

Will shakes his head. “I don’t know.” He doesn’t. Thinking about Mike is like prodding a sore tooth. It hurts, and he can’t do it for very long before it gets too painful to try. He’s pretty sure that he still cares about him but it’s all tangled up in his head, and he’d rather leave that ache alone. But if what appears to be happening actually is, then “-I think that I might be getting over it. Him.”

He can see another question forming, but Dr. Owens chooses that moment to walk into the room, face grave, and it’s completely forgotten. Joyce squeezes Will and Jonathan’s hands so hard that they both wince and try to pull away.

“Well?” she demands when he takes doesn’t say anything, and the two boys share a look. It really isn’t a good idea to mess with her when she’s this wound up.

But Dr. Owens won’t be rushed. “I understand that you’re impatient,” he tells them, “but _you_ need to understand that there have only been a few cases of this disease reversing once it reaches the third stage, and _none_ after the fourth. I don’t want to give you false hope.”

 “So it’s not –“ Joyce slumps, all of the anxious energy disappearing at once. This time, Will squeezes her hand.

“That being said,” Dr. Owens continues as though Joyce hasn’t spoken, “it does appear as though some of the vines have receded.”

Will’s eyes widen; he can see Jonathan’s doing the same. Joyce straightens up, suddenly alert. “What did you say?”

“Will’s case is unprecedented. The fact that he contracted the disease at all is remarkable; so is the length of time that he’s spent in the last stage of progression. In nearly every case, the patient was deceased days after entering stage four, and there are no records of it regressing at all after the third. It is possible that whatever rendered him vulnerable to the disease has also given him the ability to fight it. There is no way to tell. However,” he holds a hand up as Joyce opens her mouth to speak, still looking grave, “even though the vines have receded, he is still in stage four. We have no way of knowing if he will continue to get better, or if this is just a small reprieve before he grows worse.” He fixes them all with a serious look. “I feel I must encourage you to be cautious.”

They aren’t going to be cautious. Will can tell from both of their faces that in their heads, he’s already better. He doesn’t really want to be cautious either; there’s a bubble of hope expanding in his chest, and it’s already too big to burst without serious pain. However, he is going to force himself to be. For his mom, if for nothing else. He has to remember that this could be temporary.

Only it isn’t temporary. Day by day Will gets better, until he’s barely coughing at all, and only a handful of petals come up when he does. He no longer feels like he’s drowning, no longer has the weight of flowers pressing into his lungs and making it hard to breathe, and when a full week goes by without him coughing up anything at all Dr. Owens gives him a clean bill of health and sends him home. He’s to come back in a week or so to see if they can vaccinate him against the disease again – there’s a chance it won’t work, he’s warned, but it’s better to try than to do nothing at all – but aside from that he’s free and clear.

Things have changed. Lucas and Dustin (and occasionally Max) had come to see him when he was ill, but hearing about things is very different from experiencing them. It feels like it did when he came back from the Upside Down; everyone’s walking on eggshells around him and no one wants to say what’s really on their minds.

One big change is that El is back; she returned days after Will and Mike had their big fight. Dustin had found a Demogorgon in his trash and kept it as a pet, telling only Steve Harrington when it started to get big enough to eat small animals. El arrived on the scene just when it got big enough to go after the both of them, taking it out before it could do more damage than putting a giant hole in Dustin’s wall (his mom wasn’t home, and he’s grounded for life, he told Will, but at least she didn’t have to see what it was that had eaten her cat). She and Mike had a reunion straight out of one of Mrs. Wheeler’s romance novels (Will’s not sure what happens in them, exactly; just that the covers are full of women falling backwards while the shirtless men hold them up and look deep into their eyes. But Will knows Mike; that kind of stuff is right up his sappy alley) and now they’re inseparable.

(Dustin, who’s sappier than Mike on his worst day, wisely left Lucas to explain the particulars of the reunion. Will’s thing for Mike is weird, yeah, but he’s Dustin’s friend, and waxing poetical about El and Mike’s epic reunion would be an awful thing to do to him. Lucas had rolled his eyes when Dustin had explained his reasoning, but had kept strictly to the facts all the same. Even he had to admit that telling Will about the tears and the hugging and the whole Snow Ball thing would be unnecessarily cruel)

He tries not to think about Mike. He’s got a lot of extra schoolwork to do to make up for everything he missed when the Hanahaki got really bad, and it keeps him busy enough that he can pretend that he doesn’t notice his absence. Can pretend that it doesn’t hurt that his other friends are awkward around him now. He wonders if things will ever go back to normal with the others (he doesn’t even begin to hope that things with Mike will) now that they know about him. It was one thing to look past everything when he was literally dying, but he worries that now that he’s better, things look different to them. Do they think he’s a freak, too? He’s afraid to ask. Afraid the answer will be yes.

Hopper comes over a lot. He treats Will just the same as he ever did, so much so that Will almost wonders if he knows why he got sick. It doesn’t really matter, though; aside from his mom and Jonathan, Hopper is the only one who treats him normally, and he is grateful for it.

He brings El with him. Will doesn’t talk to her – finds the idea both terrifying and painful. She doesn’t talk to him either, but he catches her watching him all the time, and it makes him self-conscious. He knows that she and Mike are close, and that they spend a lot of time together, and he thinks that she probably hates him, too. And she has superpowers. He doesn’t want to think about what she can do to him if she wants. It hurts a lot, too, to know that she’s taken Will’s spot so very easily. With Mike, and with the others. He avoids her as best he can, without making it look like he is.

The holidays go by in this fashion, and then one day she finds him in Castle Byers, drawing. He draws a lot, now, even more than he used to. It makes time go by, and it helps with the nightmares. Sometimes he dreams that he never got better; that he wakes up back in the Hawkins Lab choking to death, hands scrabbling uselessly at his throat. Other times he dreams of his friends and family jeering as he collapses, yelling names at him and telling him that he’s useless, what a wimp, we’d have been happier if you’d died. And then there’s the Upside Down. It feels like there’s a part of it still in him, even with the Hanahaki completely gone (he’s properly vaccinated against it, now, and that should make him relax, but he still worries every time his chest tightens that it’s coming back; still can’t believe that it’s really over with), something that’s waiting, dormant, but will show its ugly face just when Will starts to relax.

He doesn’t remember much about the Upside Down, but his nightmares are in vivid Technicolor, and there’s no way to know what he made up and what he didn’t. Were there really large, leathery birds with one eye and long, razor sharp claws? Was there some sort of smoke monster that tried to force its way into his body? And was that large, many legged shadow he kept seeing in the distance real, or in his head? He wants to badly for it to be in his head, but he can’t be sure. The dreams are so jumbled – he runs into a building to get away from the shadow thing only to find himself surrounded by the sneering faces of his former friends, then jerks himself out of that only to choke on dream flowers – that he can’t know what might be memory or not. The only way he knows to fight it is to put them down on paper, get them out so that he can face them in some way and make them less terrifying.

He doesn’t hear her enter, so focused is he on the latest drawing – the shadow monster had been close, last night. Close enough that he had a vague idea of what it looked like – a many legged thing whose mouth was full of long, sharp teeth. He has no clue that she’s there until she speaks.

“Real.”

Startled, he looks up, and finds her looking at the back of his sketchbook. One of the birds is drawn there, and next to it he has written “REAL?” in shaky lettering. She touches the bird and looks at him, her eyes wide and serious. “Real.”

She gently removes the book from Will’s slack fingers, flipping through the drawings. The shadow. “Real.” The smoke monster. “Real.” The horrible plants that grasp and choke. “Real.” The large, rat-like things with their long tails and their claws, sharp, needle point teeth bared in a snarl. “Real.” She flips another page back, and when he sees the drawing there he grabs for the book, snatching it out of her hands. Too late. She’s seen it, seen his friends faces twisted into jeers, seen the pointed fingers. Seen the boy in the middle, curled in a ball with his eyes closed tight, tight, tight, as though if he just closes them tightly enough, makes himself small enough, then he can somehow undo what is happening.

Will slams the book shut. “I didn’t say you could,” he says, voice shaking. El doesn’t reply, and finally he looks up.

Her gaze is steady. “Not real,” she says firmly, and Will believes her.

~****~

“You should talk to him,” El says, and Will frowns at her.

“I’ve tried; he doesn’t want to talk to me.”

El rolls her eyes. “Try harder. You drew first blood.”

“Have you been talking to Dustin? You know better than to listen to him. And anyway, he hates me, remember?”

El gives him a look. It still surprises him how well she can get her point across without saying a word. He wishes that he were as good at it as she is; then maybe people would stop trying to make him talk. He tries it, sends her a look that communicates _I don’t want to._ He’s pretty sure it just looks like a pout, though. El doesn’t even change expression. He sighs.

“I don’t want to,” he says. It’s a lie; he does want to. Sort of. Mostly. But the problem is that given some time and distance he’s realized he’s a bit angry himself. He gets being angry about his apparent death wish (as his mom likes to say, rolling her eyes; now that it’s all over she’s come to look at Will’s decisions with a sort of wry amusement that drives him nuts but is better than being yelled at or worse, her crying), but Will is sure that it wasn’t the only thing that Mike was angry about. Will understands that he’s different, and he’s not dumb enough to believe that everyone is going to just be okay with it (how could he, with his father?), but he wasn’t _hurting_ Mike. It wasn’t like he was going to give him cooties just because he liked him, or something. And the more Will thinks about it, the angrier he gets.

“Lie,” El says. She frowns at him for a long moment. Will waits. He’s spent enough time with her now to know that she’s not really upset with him; she’s putting her words together in her head, thinking how to get her point across. Dustin and Lucas have both told him that she talks a lot more than she used to, and she talks more to Will (and Mike, he supposes, but neither of them have mentioned it) than just about anyone, but she’s not exactly a chatterbox.

“I don’t understand. If you’re friends, you should make up.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Yes it is.”

“Why do you care, anyway?” he snaps, irritated. “This way you get him all to yourself.”

El’s eyes widen, and Will winces. “Sorry.”

He’s supposed to be over this, he thinks. El is wonderful and he can definitely see why Mike likes her so much, and he’s over his stupid feelings anyway; he didn’t die, did he? But there’s still a part of him that is horribly jealous – the friend part, maybe. El slotted into his place in Mike’s life like a missing puzzle piece with the added bonus of being a pretty girl, and it irritates him. It makes him so angry that he misses Mike so much (even when he’s mad at him he misses him) and Mike doesn’t care at all. He knows he doesn’t because Mike never looks for him the way that Will keeps catching himself looking for Mike. He doesn’t ever forget that Will won’t be there because he doesn’t want him to be.

“Sorry,” he says again. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Did,” El says, then shakes her head. “Not true.”

Will shoots her an irritated look. “Is too,” he says. “I was just being mean, okay? I know you don’t think that.”

El is silent. Will turns his head back to his drawing and finishes it off, showing it to her. It’s her, sparks flying from her eyes and fingertips, defeating a Demogorgon. She gives it a half-smile, but it fades quickly, replaced by a pensive look that Will isn’t sure he likes very much. Still, it won’t do to ask her; El can clam up worse than anyone he knows, and she hates being prodded.

“I did think that,” El says suddenly, and Will looks at her, puzzled.

“Think what?”

“About Mike.”

“Oh.” Will isn’t sure what he’s supposed to say. He knows that El likes Mike; that they have this amazing bond that kept him pining for her for a year and made her take on Demogorgons and the Upside Down and - perhaps even more terrifying - Hopper, just to get back to him.

“He was with Max.”

“ _Oh_.” He gets it now, and he wants to laugh at how upset she looks. “That’s completely normal, El, trust me. I mean, feeling like you want someone’s attention when you like them. It’s-“

“No,” she says, shaking her head, curls flying. “I was mad. It hurt. I hurt her.” She bites her lip. “No one knows.”

Will doesn’t know if it’s the right thing to do, but he moves over so that he’s sitting next to her. He slides his arm around her shoulders and gives her a hug. She stiffens for a second and he almost lets go, but then she relaxes and puts her head on his shoulder. “Do you still feel like that?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “I like her. It felt bad.”

“Yeah,” he says. Takes a breath, lets it out slowly. Tells her, “I was jealous of you.”

He feels her shake her head against his shoulder, her hair tickling at his neck. He tries to flatten it down but the curls spring back up. “No.”

“Yes. He really likes you, and I liked him, and it was hard. I wanted him to like me. But he didn’t.” He knows that everyone knows this already, or has guessed, but he hasn’t mentioned it. Hasn’t shared. He’s surprised by how easy it is to tell her, of all people. But it’s a relief, too, to get it out, and he knows that El won’t judge. 

She shakes her head again. “Stupid,” she says, and then, “you should talk to him.”

He doesn’t answer, and she pokes him, hard. “Ow.” He squirms away from her pointy, pokey fingers. “Stop that.”

“No. Talk to him.” Poke, poke.

He laughs. “No!” he pokes her back, and she starts to giggle. Things dissolve into a tickle fight that lasts until El gets fed up and starts using her powers to hold him down while she beats him with a pillow, ignoring his shrieks that she’s cheating, cheater, and their shouts draw the rest of the house to Will’s room to see what they’re up to.

He thinks it’s forgotten, but as she and Hopper leave later that night she turns and fixes him with a glare and he knows that she hasn’t forgotten at all.

~****~

School is hard, at first. He’s never been good at making friends, always too shy and awkward for the other kids in his classes, always picked on by the bigger kids and called awful names, and it’s been worse since he came back to life last year. Zombie Boy, they call him. He hadn’t cared so much when he’d had the party to talk to; it had hurt, but he’d had his friends and they had his back no matter what. But now it’s worse. When someone calls him Zombie Boy and slaps the notebook out of his hand Dustin and Lucas aren’t always around to help him pick up his scattered papers, and Mike never is.

Classes suck, too. He shares most of them with Mike, and it’s hard not being able to turn to him and joke around, or know who his partner is going to be when they have group work. He still catches himself doing it sometimes, but Mike never looks back, never turns his head at all, and after a while Will manages to train himself out of it.

Dustin and Lucas do their best to split their time between them, but it still sucks. Everything is different, even more than when he’d returned from the Upside Down. Will wonders how long it will be before things break completely.

The last thing that he expects is to open his door one Saturday morning to find Mike standing outside it, shifting his weight from foot to foot and biting at his lower lip.

“Hi,” he says, and then when Will doesn’t say anything, “can we talk?”

Will steps outside, shutting the door. “Yeah, okay,” he says, “but not inside. My mom’s still sleeping.” She’s not; she’s making coffee, but Will doesn’t want Mike to come in.

“Right. Okay.” Mike shifts again, then straightens his back and holds out his hand. Will stares at it.

“What are you doing?”

“I want to – El said-“

Oh. And that stings, stings maybe a bit more than it should. Of course Mike is only doing this for El. Will doesn’t take Mike’s hand. He just shakes his head and turns around to go back inside.

“I’m sorry!” Mike yells, and Will turns around with wide eyes.

“What?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said I hate you. I don’t, okay? I freaked out. And I felt – it was my fault, and you were dying, and I was so mad –“ Mike’s working  himself up, his face getting redder and redder and his words coming faster the longer he speaks, and Will does what he always does when Mike gets this upset; he does it without thinking, purely on reflex. 

“Hey,” he says, reaching out and grabbing Mike’s wrist. “Stop. It’s okay.”

Mike flinches slightly, his eyes going big and round, and Will flinches too, letting Mike’s wrist go. “Sorry.”  He mumbles, taking a step back.

“No, I don’t, it’s not-“ Mike steps forward, well into Will’s space, and before Will can step back he wraps his arms around him and pulls him into a hug. “I don’t care,” he says fiercely. “I don’t-that wasn’t why I-I don’t care.”

“Mike-“

“Shut up. Just shut up for a minute. It freaked me out, alright, but it doesn’t matter, and I didn’t say that stuff because I – I said it because I was mad.” He tightens his hold on Will briefly, then pulls back to look at him. His hands stay on Will’s shoulders. “I’m sorry,” he says again.

Will nods. “Yeah, me too.”

Mike lets out a shaky laugh and one of his hands leaves Will’s shoulder to swipe across his eyes. “Yeah? For what?”

“For not telling you. Maybe if I’d had the guts, it wouldn’t have gotten so far.”

“Oh.” Mike steps back, hands falling to his sides. “You think so?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, that’s what happened, right? You found out and I-“ Will gestures at himself, feeling uncomfortable. All this time not talking about it, trying not to _think_ about it, and now it’s all anyone wants to do. But maybe Mike needs to know. Maybe it will help make things better between them if he understands that Will has gotten over it. So he steels himself, meets Mike’s eyes, and forces it out. “When you found out you freaked,” he says, “and it made me stop hoping. And then, well,” he shrugs, “I got better. It probably would have happened sooner if I’d been able to say anything. Do you see what I mean?”

Mike nods and takes another step back. “It’s all gone? Completely?”

Will grins. “Yep.” _So you don’t have to worry about it anymore_ , he thinks, and there is some bitterness there, but it isn’t really directed at Mike, and he lets it go. It’s not his fault. Mike can’t help how he feels any more than Will could.

Mike’s shoulders sag. “Oh. Good. I mean, good because you’re better, not –“

“I know what you mean,” Will says. He wonders if things are going to be different with Mike now, the way that they are with Lucas and Dustin.  If he’ll always wonder in the back of his head if Will likes him again.

(“You don’t – you never,” Lucas said, looking uncomfortable, and Will tried hard not to roll his eyes.

“No,” he said, voice dry. “I’ve never had a crush on you, okay? You either, he added, looking at Dustin. Lucas looked away, but Dustin tilted his head.

“Why not, though? I’m cute.”

Lucas groaned, and Will covered his face with his hands. “Oh my God.”)

~****~

It’s weird, at first. Of course it is. They all know that Will got sick because he had a crush on Mike, and that Mike didn’t take it well. But Mike is stubborn and El and Max genuinely don’t think it’s a big deal, so things do smooth over. It’s not exactly like it was - even without everything that happened they’re all growing up and they spend far less time in Mike’s basement playing D&D and more time doing their own things – but it’s still good.

Mike’s the one who makes it weirdest. He seems to be constantly in Will’s space all the time, standing too close or slinging an arm around his shoulders while they’re walking down the hall, but Will figures that’s him trying to make up for reacting so badly in the first place and lets it go. He likes it too much to get really mad about it, but he does sometimes think that if he still liked him it would be pretty unfair. And it does hurt, sometimes, poking at old feelings, and during those times Will has to remind himself that he he’s over it and it shouldn’t hurt anymore. And it doesn’t. It doesn’t.

Things are different, but different doesn’t have to mean worse.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading. Please let me know what you think. :)


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